37% of Droughts caused by Global Warming

Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, a scientist said Wednesday.

Peter Baines of Melbourne University in Australia analyzed global rainfall observations, sea surface temperature data as well as a reconstruction of how the atmosphere has behaved over the past 50 years to reveal rainfall winners and losers.

What he found was an underlying trend where rainfall over the past 15 years or so has been steadily decreasing, with global warming 37% responsible for the drop.

"The 37 per cent is probably going to increase if global warming continues," Baines said as he presented his findings at a major climate change conference in Perth Australia.

Four major regions has seen a large decline in rainfall. The affected areas are the continental United States, southeastern Australia, a large region of equatorial Africa and the Altiplano in South America.

At the same time there is two areas in the tropics where rainfall has been increasing – northwestern Australia and the Amazon Basin.

"This is all part of a global pattern where the rainfall is generally increasing in the equatorial tropics and decreasing in the sub-tropics in mid-latitudes," Baines said.

"This is a little bit like the pattern that the (computer) models predict for global warming but this is coming out of the rainfall observations of the past 30 years," added Baines.

The rainfall trend was also accompanied by a trend in global sea surface temperatures (SST), he said, adding he used temperature data going back to 1910.

Sea surface temperatures have also been rising as the atmosphere warms.

"If you take the SST data and analyse that over a long period you can break that up into a variety of components, such a global warming component," he said.

He also looked at the influence on rainfall of major ocean circulation patterns that have a major impact on the world's weather such as the Atlantic conveyor belt that brings warm temperatures to northern Europe.

Two Pacific circulation patterns, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, were also studied for their influence on rainfall.

The key in the analysis was to strip out the influence of the El Niño ocean-climate pattern which routinely causes drought in Southeast Asia and Australia and floods in Chile and Peru.

Baines says the Atlantic conveyor belt was 27% to blame for the decreased rainfall, while the two Pacific ocean circulation patterns were 30% responsible.

See Also:
Global Warming in Russia & the North Atlantic
Global Warming: Hurricanes in Europe?
Australian Drought

China joins Earth Hour

This year will be the first time China has joined in on Earth Hour. For environmentalists, it will be one of the most powerful images to see many of China's architectural landmarks suddenly going dark.

The whole point of Earth Hour is to promote environmental awareness and reaching China's 1.3 billion people is certainly a boost to the global environmental movement.

Securing the participation of China's cities in a country that is home to a fifth of the globe's population – and the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world – is a good start.

Organizers of Earth Hour believe China's participation will send a powerful message around the world.

"That two of China's most iconic landmarks – the Shanghai skyline and the Olympic Green – will be part of this year's effort will send a message to the rest of the world that the people of China are committed to taking action on climate change," says Dermot O'Gorman, country director of the World Wildlife Federation, the organization that inspired the movement.

"Ordinary people, too, in many cities have now signed up to switch off," he says.

Beijing and Shanghai aren't just any two cities. Their combined populations total more than 36 million – more than the entire population of Canada. They represent a huge boost to Earth Hour's global effort.

During a briefing in Beijing last week, Angel Gurria, the head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, said: "No global issue can be addressed properly without China in its midst."

Other major Chinese cities also participating include Hong Kong, Macau, Baoding, Dalian, Nanjing – where a valley of 80 skyscrapers will switch off – and countless smaller cities and towns.

They'll join hundreds of millions others – organizers hope the global total will exceed 1 billion – throughout 84 countries - for the first time.

In Beijing – in restaurants, on campuses and in private homes – there's a nascent enthusiasm about joining a global movement. The city's popular Bookworm, a bookshop and eatery, sent out an email to customers this week inviting them all for a candlelit dinner.

A New Era of Solar Energy in Ontario

A new green-energy law is coming to Ontario, combined with long-term incentives for solar energy producers.

The new law (the Green Energy Act) + incentives has solar corporations clambering over each other. Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar Inc., one of the world's leading suppliers of next-generation solar modules, and solar power supplier Recurrent Energy Inc. of San Francisco are both planning to develop multi-megawatt solar projects in Ontario.

California-based Nanosolar Inc. says it is seriously considering Ontario as the location of a regional assembly plant for its thin-film solar modules. Nanosolar is also working with French energy giant EDF Energies Nouvelles to map out future solar projects in Ontario.

Why? The new laws + new prices the province is willing to pay for solar power will tip the balance in favour of investment in Ontario.

Two other firms are also planning to build solar-cell manufacturing operations in Ontario.

The recent Green Energy Act and a new renewable-power purchase program that offers a generous premium for green power is just a start. The Ontario Power Authority has proposed an European-style "feed-in tariffs" that would see it pay, as part of a 20-year contract, 80.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of power that comes from a residential rooftop solar photovoltaic system.

(NOTE: Critics will point out that people in Ontario currently pay approx. 7 cents per kWh, so this seems like a ploy by the Ontario Power Authority to jack up electricity prices.)

Long-term contracts under a feed-in tariff model is superior to approaches in the United States that tend to be based on upfront tax incentives that create short-term sales spurts.

In theory as systems grow larger the feed-in tariff would decline. The power authority would pay 71.3 cents for rooftop systems up to 100 kilowatts, dropping to 63.5 cents for systems up to 500 kilowatts and 53.9 cents for anything above that. The largest systems would likely be found on the rooftops of schools, commercial buildings and big-box stores.

The lowest tariff, 44.3 cents, applies to "ground mount" systems that don't exceed 10 megawatts. This would apply to the massive solar farms that sprawl across acres of empty fields.

All prices replace a fixed 42-cent tariff that applied to all system categories that existed under a previous program, which itself was a continental first when introduced two years ago.

So already Ontario is paying extra for green energy, and some customers are willing to pay more for green electricity... but are they willing to pay even more?

These new prices are great news for people wanting to produce electricity in their backyard, and maybe even good for people willing to pay the extra for green energy, but what about regular electricity consumers? They care more about price than whether it is green or not.

Arno Harris, CEO of Recurrent Energy, said the new tariffs makes Ontario an attractive market for his company, which yesterday purchased a project pipeline totalling 350 megawatts from Chicago-based UPC Solar.

Harris said Recurrent and other large developers are taking advantage of the economic downtown to consolidate the market. The "vast majority" of projects acquired from UPC, he says, are based in Ontario.

"Our goal is to develop over 100 megawatts and get it into commercial operation by 2012," says Harris, explaining that economies of scale allow the company to lower costs by placing bulk orders for solar modules.

In early March, First Solar purchased a pipeline of more than 2,000 megawatts of solar projects from Hayward, Calif.-based OptiSolar Inc. in a stock deal valued at $400 million (U.S.). About 10% of those projects are based in Ontario.

Solar developers are pushing for 50 cent tariffs for large land-based solar fields in an effort to lure investment and green-collar jobs. They claim the current prices don't make it profitable enough to get investments to build.

The power authority says the tariffs have only been proposed and could change after eight weeks of consultation with industry players. "Anyone having concerns with the proposed pricing should provide their feedback to the agency," said energy ministry spokeswoman Amy Tang.

But who's going to pay for higher prices? Consumers?

Right now the cheapest alternative isn't to buy green electricity, its to buy your own solar/wind power and make it yourself.

Solar module prices are expected to fall dramatically this year and 2010 as new cheaper/more efficient solar panels come into the market.

Ozone tied to respiratory death rate

Residents of big cities face greater threat to breathing hazards and death due to pollution, a new study finds.

According to the study long-term exposure to ozone in Toronto may be responsible for approx. 20% of all lung-related deaths in the city. The massive new American study on health risks of the common air pollutant compares smog levels in major North American cities and deaths caused by smog.

People who live in cities with smoggy ozone pollution are 25% to 30% more likely to die from lung disease than those living in areas with the cleanest air, researchers reported.

The study, which looked at data tracking 450,000 people over 18 years, suggests the current emphasis on peak ozone days (also known as smog days) as the smog component's major health danger ignores the serious, cumulative perils that breathing it over a lifetime impose.

"It's not just the peaks you should worry about, it's the cumulative, entire ozone season that's important, too," says George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University.

"So we can't just sort of hide in our homes on the peak days and avoid the adverse effects of ozone," says Thurston, who directed the air pollution portion of the study.

The report, released today in the New England Journal of Medicine, does not look at Canadian cities, but York University air pollution expert Geoff Harris says Toronto's ozone levels are almost identical with those found in many large cities in the northeast United States.

About 20% of respiratory deaths in these cities can be directly attributable to long-term exposure to the pollutant. Ozone and fine airborne particles are two of the major components of smog. In New York and Washington ozone smog increased the risk of dying of any respiratory ailment, from cancers to a severe asthma attack, by approx. 25%.

In very smoggy Los Angeles ozone increased the risk of dying of any respiratory ailment by about 50%.

Ozone in the upper reaches of the atmosphere helps protect the Earth from the sun's punishing ultraviolet rays. But at ground level, ozone is corrosive is a key player in respiratory fatalities.

Ground level ozone is created by sunlight reacting with nitrogen dioxide and fine particle pollutants emitted by cars, factories and coal-fired generating plants. The resulting triple oxygen molecule (O3) is volatile, and can react with the vulnerable surface of the lung, breaking down the tissue and causing a host of pulmonary conditions.

Doctors have long known that ozone is hazardous. Short-term exposure aggravates asthma symptoms and causes breathing problems. It is especially dangerous for those people who suffer from pre-existing pulmonary conditions such as emphysema.

The study is the first to tease out the relative percentage that ozone exposure contributes to deaths due to smog. The study will give more ammunition to groups like his to argue for tougher pollution standards.

Toronto Public Health says air pollution in general accounts for about 1,700 premature deaths in the GTA and 6,000 hospital admissions each year.

See Also: Pollution in Canada getting worse, statistics show

Sea levels rising faster than predicted

Top climate scientists warned today that rising sea levels could rise twice as much as previously projected in 2007.

Right: NASA Photo of what the Earth would look like if the sea level rose 2 meters.

A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a sea level rise of 18 to 59 centimeters by 2100. But scientists meeting today in Copenhagen dismissed those estimates as too conservative, saying new data suggest that sea level rise will exceed 1 meter and happen a lot sooner than previously suggested.

"This means that if the emissions of greenhouse gases is not reduced quickly and substantially, even the best-case scenario will hit low-lying coastal areas housing one-tenth of humans on the planet hard," organizers said in a statement at the three-day congress hosted by the University of Copenhagen.

The melting of polar ice sheets and of glaciers are two big factors that will affect sea levels, they added.

"Unless we undertake urgent and significant mitigation actions, the climate could cross a threshold during the 21st century committing the world to a sea level rise of metres," said John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research.

The conclusions of the conference will be presented to politicians meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 to discuss a new global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Some 1,600 reports from nearly 80 countries have been submitted to the conference, many of them pointing to evidence of melting sea ice, melting ice in Greenland, Canada and Antarctica.

Last week a group of scientists at Laval University in Quebec announced arctic ice might melt completely in the Summer of 2013, which combined with melting ice in Greenland would raise sea levels by approx. 7 meters. The same scientists also said it was too late to stop the melting.

See Also:
Arctic Ice to vanish by 2013
Flooded Cities by 2013?
Toronto breaks temperature record, again
Vancouver and Montreal could become flooded
Greenland ice melting faster than expected

Ground temperatures rising in Canada

According to a new Canadian study, global warming has caused ground temperatures across the country to rise over the past few decades, in some cases by as much as a few degrees. The study is the first comprehensive assessment of Canada's shallow geothermal resources.

The study shows that thermal energy can be harvested with geo-exchange technologies and used for heating homes and buildings during the winter. This is good news for homeowners using Geothermal Heating Systems.

"There was this realization that we had a heat pulse going into the ground and it was a function of climate warming. It's really one of the best records of climate warming there is in Canada," said study co-author Stephen Grasby, a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada. "Depending on where you are ground temperature has increased by a few degrees."

"We actually have this opportunity to retrieve that heat energy trapped by global warming, to use that heat that's gone into the ground to offset future use of non-renewable energy sources," says Grasby.

The study, published in the journal Natural Resource Research, assessed ground temperatures across Canada down to 250 meters to get a sense of the potential resource. The researchers found that the heat energy in the first 50 meters alone was roughly equivalent to the commercially recoverable energy in the oil sands. Thats a lot actually, suggesting that if Canadians wanted to invest in Geothermal technology it would be more profitable than the Alberta Oil Sands.

Low-temperature geothermal technologies, often called geo-exchange systems, are capable of efficiently extracting warmth from the ground at shallow depths to heat homes and building. High-temperature geothermal systems tap heat kilometers below the Earth's surface to produce steam that is used to turn turbines and generate electricity.

"It equates to more than 190 million barrels of oil equivalent," said Grasby. He emphasized that the resource is spread out across the entire country, making it impractical to harvest more than a fraction of the total energy potential.

"But even if a small percentage of it is recoverable it's still going to potentially make a marked impact on renewable-energy supply," said Grasby. "Even if you end up with one or two per cent of it, you've still got one or two million barrels equivalent (of oil). It's a big number."

Temperatures typically increase at lower depth, but the researchers found that the temperature differences at 50 meters, 100 meters and 200 meters are getting smaller because shallower depths are heating up.

"The shallow rock mass of Canada has been shown to store a large component of heat due to recent climatic warming," according to the study.

"This suggests that we may have similar heat energy from the upper 50 meters compared to deeper levels depending on the location and relevant recent history (of) surface temperature changes."

The geological survey is working on another study that will attempt to estimate the portion of shallow geothermal resource that's easily recoverable, such as with heat-pump systems. Another study to be published later this year that will estimate the country's potential for generating electricity from geothermal resources at a temperature of 150 degree Celsius and higher.

Alison Thompson, executive director of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association, said the geological survey studies are welcome and long overdue, but the analysis is based on ground temperature data collected prior to 1985, which is when funding for the federal geothermal energy program was pulled.

Thompson said new data must be collected to get an accurate estimate and to raise the profile of geothermal energy, which despite its massive potential is largely overlooked in Canada as a renewable source of electricity generation.

The geothermal association, which has set the goal of developing 5,000 megawatts of geothermal power projects in Canada by 2015, has identified 33 areas that need to be studied but has found it challenging to raise the required funding to carry out such studies.

"We feel the rest of the country doesn't understand how big this resource is," said Thompson. "For $1 million we could be off and running and really answer all the questions that politicians have. This would be a game-changer for the industry."

Grasby said interest in the area is growing, particularly in Alberta, where the oil and gas industry's drilling and ground-fracturing expertise can be easily applied to geothermal projects. "You just need a regulatory framework to support it," he says.

Canada is the only country located on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" that has NOT developed its high-temperature geothermal resources on a commercial scale. The United States, Japan, China, Russia all have developed their geothermal resources. Many industry experts argue that geothermal could play an important role in reducing natural gas consumption in the oil sands, making it cheaper to get oil out of the tar sands.

The Pembina Institute, a Calgary think tank, released a report in January that estimated there were 21 billion gigawatt-hours of energy released every year below the surface of Alberta at depths of less than 5 kilometres.

"Even with the conservative assumption that only 0.5 per cent of this potential is recoverable, it represents the equivalent of roughly 14 million megawatts of generating capacity," or 1,100 times the current generating capacity of all existing power plants in Alberta, according to the report.

The report cited lack of public awareness as the key barrier to developing the resource.

The geothermal association hopes to raise that awareness level on April 22nd in Vancouver, where it will hold the industry's first major geothermal energy conference in decades. More than 250 people are expected to attend the event, which is timed to coincide with Earth Day.

Arctic Ice to vanish by 2013

The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover could vanish as early as summer 2013, decades earlier than previously predicted, says scientist Warwick Vincent.

Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which indicate an ice free summer in 2013.

"2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong – each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," says Vincent. "We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008. But at the same time 2008 also record warm weather in parts of the arctic, with temperatures rising to 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the usual 5 degrees. In 2008 five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, ice which is more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23% according to satellite analysis.

In 2004 a major international panel forecast the ice could vanish by 2100. In December 2008 some experts said the summer ice could last until 2020 or 2030.

When the ice disappears shipping companies will be able to make short cuts through the Canadian and Russian Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.

"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there," Vincent said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

Its now not a question of whether the ice will melt, it a question of when.

Its also a question of what should we do about it? Ice melting in Greenland and the Antarctic could raise sea levels dramatically by 7 meters (22 feet) or more and flood many of the world's port cities.

See Also:
Rising Sea Levels
Climate Change will effect Economy
Ancient ice shelf snaps free from Canada
Global Warming in Russia & the North Atlantic
7 Environmental Problems That Are Worse Than We Thought
The Theory of Rapid Climate Change